Deixis in the context of Utterance

In linguistics, grammatical person is the grammatical distinction between deictic references to participant(s) in an event; typically, the distinction is between the speaker (first person), the addressee (second person), and others (third person). A language's set of pronouns is typically defined by grammatical person. First person includes the speaker (English: I, we), second person is the person or people spoken to (English: your or you), and third person includes all that are not listed above (English: he, she, it, they). It also frequently affects verbs, and sometimes nouns or possessive relationships.

In linguistics, an honorific (abbreviated HON) is a grammatical or morphosyntactic form that encodes the relative social status of the participants of the conversation. Distinct from honorific titles, linguistic honorifics convey formality FORM, social distance, politeness POL, humility HBL, deference, or respect through the choice of an alternate form such as an affix, clitic, grammatical case, change in person or number, or an entirely different lexical item. A key feature of an honorific system is that one can convey the same message in both honorific and familiar forms—i.e., it is possible to say something like (as in an oft-cited example from Brown and Levinson) "The soup is hot" in a way that confers honor or deference on one of the participants of the conversation.

Honorific speech is a type of social deixis, as an understanding of the context—in this case, the social status of the speaker relative to the other participants or bystanders—is crucial to its use.

In linguistics, anaphora (/əˈnæfərə/) is the use of an expression whose interpretation depends upon another expression in context (its antecedent). In a narrower sense, anaphora is the use of an expression that depends specifically upon an antecedent expression and thus is contrasted with cataphora, which is the use of an expression that depends upon a postcedent expression. The anaphoric (referring) term is called an anaphor. For example, in the sentence Sally arrived, but nobody saw her, the pronoun her is an anaphor, referring back to the antecedent Sally. In the sentence Before her arrival, nobody saw Sally, the pronoun her refers forward to the postcedent Sally, so her is now a cataphor (and an anaphor in the broader sense, but not in a narrower one). Usually, an anaphoric expression is a pro-form or some other kind of deictic (contextually dependent) expression. Both anaphora and cataphora are species of endophora, referring to something mentioned elsewhere in a dialog or text.

Anaphora is an important concept for different reasons and on different levels: first, anaphora indicates how discourse is constructed and maintained; second, anaphora binds different syntactical elements together at the level of the sentence; third, anaphora presents a challenge to natural language processing in computational linguistics, since the identification of the reference can be difficult; and fourth, anaphora partially reveals how language is understood and processed, which is relevant to fields of linguistics interested in cognitive psychology.

Karl Ludwig Bühler (German: [ˈbyːlɐ]; 27 May 1879 – 24 October 1963) was a German psychologist and linguist. In psychology he is known for his work in Gestalt psychology, and he was one of the founders of the Würzburg School of psychology. In linguistics he is known for his organon model of communication and his treatment of deixis as a linguistic phenomenon.

He was the dissertation advisor of Karl Popper.

Relative tense and absolute tense are distinct possible uses of the grammatical category of tense. Absolute tense means the grammatical expression of time reference (usually past, present or future) relative to "now" – the moment of speaking. In the case of relative tense, the time reference is construed relative to a different point in time, the moment being considered in the context. In other words, the reference point (or center of deixis) is the moment of discourse or narration in the case of absolute tense, or a different moment in the case of relative tense.

A further distinction has also been made between "strict relative" tense, which merely expresses time relative to the reference point, and "absolute-relative tense" (such as pluperfect), which expresses time relative to the reference point while also placing the reference point in time relative to the present moment.